


no demons for the damned

by Anonymous



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Backstory, Canon Compliant, Clint Barton's Farm, Clint's 616 backstory, Developing Relationships, F/M, Future Fic, Gen, In a sense, Multi, Non-Linear Narrative, Pre-Canon, Speculation, Vignette, if clint barton or his family die in infinity war i'll burn my computer, in which i cherrypick canon, laura barton is/was a shield agent in this, mostly - Freeform, mostly linear narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-13
Updated: 2018-03-15
Packaged: 2019-02-14 03:52:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 10,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12999273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: He shoots to kill.





	1. an ending, and a beginning

He shoots to kill (is what he tells the bland, smiling suit, his hands cuffed to the table in clear sight so he can’t wiggle his way out of them, his legs tied to the chair).

“We know,” the man says in reply, smile still firmly in place. “We’ve seen you in action.”

He asks why they don’t shoot him in return. He picks at his fingernail with his thumb. 

The man places a thick folder on the table and opens it. His face, ten years younger, hair filthy and unbrushed, stares out at him from the first page, flinty and angry. And yet – he looks softer than he remembers himself ever being.

The man flips through the papers and settles on a faded flier – _THE AMAZING HAWKEYE_.

“We can use you,” the man says.

He grins, knowing his teeth match the rest of him – bloody and broken. “My loyalty isn’t cheap,” he informs the man.

“We can afford you,” the man says.

-

They lock him in, the first day, and the days after, and the months after, a guard or two posted at the windows and doors, stripped and searched after every mission. Standard probation protocol, he’s told by the doctor that slaps a bandage on the gaping hole in his leg. They plant a tracking device in him that’ll electrocute him with the press of a button. They only let him on the range if his feet are chained together and his gun can be disabled remotely. He finds that he doesn’t care – he has a hot meal every day, a bed that isn’t crawling with bed bugs and ticks, and medical care where they’ll let him have extra painkillers if he flirts well enough.

They tell him that they’re the good guys, and he laughs, because they try. They hired him, didn’t they, plucked him off his perch where he was about to shoot the French ambassador, robbed him of the other half of the juicy paycheck he was offered by HYDRA, offered a larger, juicier one to work for them, and not so mildly told him it was this or the other end of a gun.

He’s in the cafeteria, surrounded by highly trained men and women, not a single weapon on him, and still, the crowd parts around him when he walks to his table.

“Hawkeye,” someone says.

The speaker’s eyes are narrowed, reflecting the light strangely.

He forces a smile on his face and waves at her.

“You killed my partner,” she says.

He searches his memories for her face, and finds nothing. He shrugs and has a spoonful of his oatmeal. He looks up when a hand lands on his shoulder, hard enough that he has to resist the urge to punch her. He tells her as much.

When her face doesn’t change and her grip doesn’t loosen, he says, “What, you want me to issue an apology to every goddamn agent here?”

If her hand felt like stone before, now it feels like a steel clamp, digging into his shoulder like the unforgiving jaws of a bear trap.

“You don’t deserve this,” she says.

The agents around them are pretending not to be listening, and he thinks this is the only reason why she lets go and walks away.

Rolling his shoulders, he turns to his oatmeal and takes another bite.

-

He sleeps heavy in between missions, while on them he doesn’t sleep at all.

“Make the shot,” Coulson says. He’s panting slightly, the only indication of exertion.

His rifle was abandoned hours ago. He holds a backup pistol in his hand and aims at the man wearing a blood-splattered suit, doubled over and catching his breath.

He shoots.

-

He dreams.

“Make the shot,” his AIM handler orders, his voice distorted and twisted.

Inhale. He looks through the unneeded scope of his rifle at the little girl clinging onto her father’s hand. Thinks about a dark New York alleyway. The smell of hay and rot. The blinding lights of the hospital.

She sniffles and holds her stuffed bear up to her chest.

He shoots. Exhale.

The bear explodes into stuffing.

-

When Coulson leaves, he doesn’t lock the door.

In a brief, insane moment, he has the sudden urge to call Coulson back, remind him to lock it. His eye twitches. He’s memorized the routes to the range, the armory, the jet hanger, the garage, can get to any of those places in less than five minutes, despite the distance.

_Loyalty was always your worst trait_ , a voice hisses in the back of his head.

There’s a tracker in him that forces him under the whim of whoever chooses. His weapons are confiscated after every mission, there’s still two guards in the hallway. His door is unlocked.

He wraps himself in the thin blanket and sleeps.

-

The psychiatrist is bored, asking and not expecting an answer, “How was your last mission?” Behind her, his guard looms in the corner of the room, a smudge of shadow against the pale green walls and cabinets.

He likes to see how still he can stay during these mandatory meetings, focusing on his breathing and heartbeat until he’s hyperaware of every muscle movement, every small uncontrollable twitch that he hasn’t trained out of himself yet.

Minutes pass. Hours, maybe.

The psychiatrist says, “Well, Specialist Barton, the hour’s up. Feel free to go.”

When he leaves, the shadow follows.

-

He curls his mouth up into a scowl, though he knows it doesn’t mean much. “I’ve been here for over a year,” he says. “I deserve that much.”

His supervisor, Agent Green or something like that, has an impressive poker face. “You’re still on probation,” he says.

_You don’t deserve this._

He takes a deep breath of air. “I understand, sir,” he says. “But I’ve more than proven myself trustworthy. I’d like to be able to take a shit without someone watching my ass.”

Green’s face, strangely enough, softens. “Get to the jet, Barton,” he says.

When he gets home from the mission, his shadow is gone.

-

He sits in the cafeteria and eats his oatmeal.

“Hey,” the women across from him says. “I’m Laura Thompson.” She wears her brown hair tied back in a braid and wears a soft red sweater.

He raises an eyebrow.

“I worked on your case, a while back,” she says. “Before Coulson stepped in and took all the glory for himself.” She holds her hand out to him, her sweater sleeve dipping into his oatmeal.

He takes it. Her hands are warm and lightly calloused, and a jagged scar spans across her palm.

“Clint Barton,” he says. “But you knew that.”

Laura Thompson smiles, her eyes crinkling around the edges. “You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t.” She pulls away, wiping her sleeve on a napkin.

The agents this time around are better at hiding their curiosity. He goes back to his oatmeal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _"This is an agent of some kind."_


	2. growing pains

“Have you been stealing,” Coulson says, his voice so flat as to render the question not much of a question at all.

He flashes Coulson his most winning smile. He has eleven uncashed checks stuffed under his mattress, and the socks he’d been given when he first signed on have holes in the heel and toes. He worries at the frayed hem of his over-sized shirt.

Coulson informs his that the money they’ve been paying him should be more than enough to cover the costs of whatever he needs. They don’t search his rooms anymore, so he knows Coulson isn’t just playing dumb, trying to get him to confess to a crime he’s already been pronounced guilty of.

Coulson frowns and calls the accounting department. A minute or so later, Coulson stands up and walks out of the room.

He follows.

“Show me,” Coulson says when they reach his room.

He shows him.

Coulson’s face pinches. “Alright,” Coulson says. “Let’s sort this out.”

-

Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck _fuck_.

He ducks under the knife that comes whizzing through the open skylight, stumbles behind a wall, clutching his leg and trying to pinpoint the location of fucking _Bullseye_ , bane of his goddamn existence. When a shurikan embeds itself into the drywall besides him, he starts moving again, winding his way through the halls of the crumbling building. The window next to him shatters as an arrow flies through a hole in the ceiling and into the glass.

“Barton!” Coulson yells through the comm, voice almost completely obscured by the crackling and the sound of several more high speed arrows breaking windows.

“Mission’s fucked, sir,” he says. “Bullseye’s on the floor above me, taking potshots.”

He practically falls down the stairs, tripping over his own feet and feeling pain lance up his leg. When he makes it down the second flight of stairs, he stumbles over a discarded quiver with five arrows in it.

He stops in his mad scramble and stoops to sling the quiver over his shoulder. To his left, there’s a compound bow on the floor. A surge of glee sweeps over him at the only good news he’s had since the start of the mission registers in his head.

“We’re on our way,” Coulson says.

He picks the bow up and tests the weight, grabbing an arrow from the quiver. “Don’t worry, sir,” he says softly. “I got this.”

When his team finally make their way into the building, they find him grinning madly, compound bow in hand, Bullseye tied up next to him with a new hole in his thigh.

-

He likes sitting with Laura, because she doesn’t bother him. She doesn’t eat with him every day, because they both busy often, but when she does, she talks quietly about her sister’s bakery and her little niece finally starting school and how, when she was little, she wanted to be an artist.

She shrugs. “I’m pretty decent,” she says.

One day, Laura hands him a napkin with a sketch of him done in ballpoint pen, brow furrowed in concentration as he stares down the barrel of a gun.

“I have a whole collection,” she says, pulling out a small notebook stuffed with sketches done on any scraps of paper she must’ve had on her at the time – receipts, napkins, checks, envelopes, mission reports.

He surprises himself by feeling pleased when he recognizes most of her subjects.

She traces the curve of a line indicating the swell of Agent Jackson’s stomach, well into her second trimester. “I think I would’ve been a painter,” Laura says.

He stares at the drawing of himself. In any lifetime, he thinks, he would’ve been at the end of a gun.

-

“You’re going to like this,” Coulson says, filled with barely restrained excitement that’s so unlike him he wonders if Coulson’s been replaced with a body double.

He asks that very question, which makes Coulson’s eyes shine in a way that makes him want to crawl under his bed.

“Alright,” Coulson says.

The bow and arrows are unveiled like a prize.

He freezes.

“No,” he hears himself say out loud.

“No?” he hears Coulson say.

He feels the heat of the spotlight, the sweat gleaming on his arms and upper lip, the tense anticipation of the crowd, the smell of popcorn and gunpowder, his nails digging into his thigh. “No,” he repeats.

And yet –

He grabs the bow, and it feels like – feels like – it’s already stringed for him, so he tugs at it, feels the tension, the coiled strength. 

He turns, grabbing an arrow, nocking it, pulling back, and releasing in one fluid motion. He doesn’t look at the target.

Inhale. Draw. Exhale. Release. Repeat.

When the quiver is empty, his breathing is steady, and he lowers the bow on an exhale.

It feels like drowning.

-

Laura slips a drawing of him, nocking an arrow, underneath his door.

He tucks it under his mattress.


	3. vulnerability

_The Black Widow_. _Name: Unknown. Sex: Female. Age: Unknown. Status: Unknown. Suspected Active_. _Citizenship: Russia. Notes: Attended Markov School of Ballet (see_ Red Room; Belova, Yelena; Underwood, Dorothy “Dottie”; Carter, Margaret E. “Peggy” _)._

Her hair is short, muted red, and her face is dirt-smudged. She wraps her arm around the wound sluggishly bleeding from her side. Her eyes are hard and unforgiving.

 _Updated status: Active. (see_ Hawkeye)

“Shoot me,” she says, in Russian. It’s not a taunt, no matter how much she tries. She just sounds tired, and desperate.

 _Hawkeye. Name: Barton, Clinton F. Sex: Male. Status: Agent (see_ Coulson, Philip J. _)._

It would only take an instant for him to release the arrow. Inhale. He thinks about a cheering – jeering? –  crowd. Thinks about his first night in a building surrounded by enemies, a promise on his tongue. Glittery makeup, smeared by sweat and shit. The sound of knives thudding into a wooden target. A notebook with scraps of paper drifting out like ash. A gleaming arc of carbon fiber and nanotubes, his for the taking. An unpayable debt.

 _Updated status: Fugitive (see_ The Black Widow _)._

-

One day, in a future no one expects except for Nick Fury, Steve Rogers – _Captain America_ , holy shit –  will say to him, quickly, like he’s embarrassed, “AreyouandMissRomanovsweethearts,” and he will raise his eyebrows, thoroughly unimpressed, and Steve Rogers will blush a faint shade of pink and explain, hastily, that he wanted to know for reasons purely related to their team relations.

Natasha passes behind him and ruffles his hair, which makes Rogers’s blush deepen.

He suppresses a laugh.

-

In a nearer future, a future he expects but dreads, he’ll be cuffed with vibranium and led to an interrogation room, where Coulson will stare at him for an hour before sighing and asking, disappointment and anger and fear and frustration crashing into each other like haphazard waves, what _the hell_ he was thinking.

He’ll shrug and ask to talk to Fury.

-

Even nearer, the Black Widow will stitch up his wounds and tell him that her name is Natalia Romanova.

Slightly delirious from fever and pain, he’ll frown and say, “Too many syllables. Too Russian.”

She’ll curse at him in each of the dozens of languages she knows, and later, heart racing from yet another shoot-out, will say, “Sometimes, I was Natasha Romanov.”

He flashes her a grin and pulls out an arrow from one man’s eye. “Clint Barton,” he says, setting sharp American consonants alongside her elegant syllables. “It’s nice to meet you.”

-

“We’re coworkers,” he says, undercover, or sometimes, “She’s my girlfriend,” or even, “She’s my cousin.”

“Murder road trip,” he tells Coulson, Nick Fury, and his issued psychologist, which makes all of them frown in increasingly comical ways.

He shrugs when Dr. Banner asks.

The truth is –

-

Exhale. He releases the arrow, embedding it an inch above her head.

She doesn’t flinch, but she stares at him, something like shock mixing with anger in her expression.

“We have to go,” he says. He drops his bow on the ground with a clatter, turning to the rubble-covered exit and trying to make a large enough hole for the two of them to slip through. She’s smaller than him, so if worse comes to worse she’ll escape and he’ll feign a concussion, or something. “There’s a kill-on-sight order on you,” he growls in Russian when she doesn’t move. “Come help me so we can get outta here.”

It takes a moment, but soon she settles next to him, helping him move a chunk of concrete out of the doorway.

When they escape, his backup hot on their tails, he leaves his bow behind.


	4. self-preservation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> listen all these chapters are like, barely edited, so feel free to point out any mistakes

It’s worse, now.

Coulson never supervises his missions, because he’d run on Coulson’s watch, he hasn’t seen Natasha since they turned themselves in at the Tatra headquarters, nearly four months ago, and his new tails don’t extend the slightest amount of effort to subtlety.

He collapses into his bed, not bothering to take off his boots.

He hears the lock click into place behind him as he drifts off into sleep.

-

“Hey,” Tasha says, lifting the vent cover and crawling out. “You’re still locked up.”

He glares at her in the mirror, spitting the water in his mouth out and rinsing off his toothbrush.

He places his toothbrush on the edge of the sink and turns around.

“You’re supposed to be under guard,” he says.

“So are you,” she says, arranging herself on his bed and rifling through one of the paperbacks he has on his nightstand. “You said SHIELD agents were highly trained.”

She looks better. Her hair, which had been cut short as a disguise, has started growing back out, and falls to her shoulders in well-washed waves. The darkness under her eyes has vanished, and she isn’t even wearing any makeup. There’s no sign of discontent, other than her ever-present wariness.

Natasha sets the book down. “They wanted to implant a tracker, today.”

She had helped him rip his out only an hour after their escape, after they had disappeared into the city, digging her fingers and her knife into his back and spine with ruthless precision, like she had done it a thousand times before. He had warned her, before they arrived weaponless in front of a building teeming with agents with eagles stitched to their jackets, of what would happen to her. What had happened to him.

“I said no,” she says, in a way that means she did more than _say_ no, “and they listened.”

“You’re the Black Widow,” he says, smirking.

“Yes,” she says.

She had closed her eyes, when he told her of all the ways she would be violated in SHIELD, and told him, tinged with amusement, and said that she was used to it.

He had wanted to reply that _yes, so was I._

-

The sixth month, he only has one guard on him, and he’s allowed to go to the mess again, even if he and Natasha’s schedules are carefully arranged so that they never see each other.

Laura’s there, grinning as she recounts something to Agent Smalls and not caring that her boots are covered in mud and that her coat is bloodstained at the bottom. She doesn’t see him, because when he sees her, he grits his teeth, grabs a protein bar, and retreats back to his rooms.

-

“Nat says you’ve been avoiding me,” Laura says, setting a bowl of soup next to his oatmeal and sitting next to him.

He doesn’t startle, because he’s too well trained for that, and neither does he splutter for words even as his brain starts blaring alarms at him, but he does arch his eyebrows up, stare at her incredulously, and ask, “Nat?”

She smiles. “Natasha Romanoff. You know, the reason why you’re staring sullenly at your oats instead of shooting at drug dealers in Kiev.”

“No,” he says. “Just – Nat?” He’s not surprised Laura and Natasha found their way to each other, even though he’s never mentioned a word of Laura in the entire year and a half they’d been together.

In response, Laura reaches into the pockets of her greatcoat and pulls out a scrap of paper, on which she has drawn Natasha in blue pen, grinning at a faceless and undefined junior agent she’s pinned to the floor. “They’ve got her in basic training. Thinks it’ll teach the newbies something.”

He blinks at her. “Not on missions?”

Laura cocks her head at him, her mouth quirked up in an expression that means she’s laughing at him, but in a way that doesn’t make him want to crawl into a closet. “Of course not,” she says, like it’s obvious, which makes him want to crawl into a closet. “If Sitwell has his way she’d never touch a gun again.”

She pulls out her notebook. It looks nearly twice as thick as it had before he’d left.

She spends the rest of lunch going over the latest gossip with him, using her drawings to illustrate. Jackson and McDougall had an epic break up and immediately got back together. Coulson started dating a pilot, then broke up a week later. When Clint had resurfaced, a thousand sleep cycles were normalized.

She laughs at the last one.

If their hands brush when she turns the pages, well. Neither of them mention it.

-

Coulson sits the two of them down, his hands folded together on top of an opened folder with their profiles on the top.

“I presume you’ve heard of STRIKE,” Coulson says.

He and Natasha exchange glances.

Coulson spreads out the contents of the folder out on the table. It’s mission reports, photos, kill lists.

“I’m assembling a team,” he says. “Special ops. I want you two.”

It's the easiest decision he’s ever had to make. He leans forward, crossing his arms on the table, and says, “I’m listening.”

-

In Rio de Janeiro, Natasha steals his rice, even though she has her own, and tells her over lunch that Laura’s missing.

He swallows his bite of chicken. “What do you mean?” he asks, voice carefully neutral. He takes a sip of his coffee.

“I mean,” Natasha says, in flawless Spanish that’ll push away the Portuguese-speaking Brazilians, “that she’s missing. Johnson swept her up in a mission she was never cleared to go on, botched up the whole job, and now she’s being held somewhere outside of Minsk.”

Neither of them are wearing comms, because their target is a sharp-eyed bastard who’s killed two of their agents already. But Team THETA is arriving within the day, and in the bustling city, it’s quite easy to slip through the masses, bribe a pilot, make their way to Europe, to Belarus.

“How’d you find out?” he asks.

Natasha gives him a look that tells him she already knows what he’s thinking.

“We can go,” she says, simply.

It’s been two years since his last great escape. He finishes his coffee. Thinks about Natasha, tired and world-weary. Thinks about Coulson, quietly competent and much the same. Thinks about the first tentative days back at SHIELD, hostility more rampant than on his first arrival. Natasha, banned from any weapons, making the junior agents cower with nothing but her smile. Laura, her ink-stained hands and soft words.

“We can’t,” he says, and he feels what’s left of his heart break.

Natasha smiles at him, kind and a little sad, and he feels the rest of it burn.


	5. hope

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's a christmas miracle?

Laura looks small and pale in the medical bay. They’d cleaned her up, casted her legs, wrapped her up in layers upon layers of bandages until she looked fit to rot in a sarcophagus. There’s an ugly bruise blooming on her left cheek, a shallow cut over her eye.

He feels like he’s dreaming.

Laura – with her neat suits and sweaters, her pen gently scraping against paper, her hands against his – doesn’t belong here, with her hair fanned out behind her like a halo and her face grey and sallow.

He wants to run.

Natasha appears, ghostlike, and tugs him away.

He buries his face in her hair.

-

Laura’s hands shake when she isn’t paying attention.

“I’m retiring,” she says, voice hoarse.

Before he can react, she continues, “This was never the life for me. I think – I think I’ll become an artist.” She looks like she wants to say more, but she closes her eyes and presses the button for more morphine. She sleeps.

-

He helps her fill out the paperwork for her early retirement, her pension, her non-disclosure contract. He learns that they’re only a few months apart in age, that her family owns large plots of land in Wisconsin and Minnesota, that Thompson is her mother’s middle name, that she’d been married once for less than a year before getting divorced.

He knows, intellectually, that he didn’t have an exactly normal life, even before he’d turned to killing for cash, but he’s never felt it more acutely as he scrawls down Laura’s tired answers in his blocky handwriting.

He’s never asked why she joined SHIELD, when she had so much better to do than this – secrets piled on secrets piled on secrets – but he thinks he understands less about her than he thought.

And what he thought he understand is different, now.

Her smile is shakier; she flinches away minutely when he moves too suddenly; she draws obsessively, even if her lines are sharper, stronger, and she doesn’t have the control that she used to have. There are edges he doesn’t know to avoid, shades of grey where previously there were streaks of black or white. She reminds him of Natasha, in the early days, when he had woken up to a gun trained between his eyes every morning.

They take it day by day.

-

Laura leaves in early May, while he’s in Peru with Natasha.

She leaves behind her sketches –hundreds of them – tucked under his mattress. There’s no note, but on the very top is a drawing of something that happened, perhaps, in a dream. She stands in the center, her arms slung around his and Natasha’s shoulders. She’s laughing. Natasha looks amused, the ends of her lips quirked upwards in a ghost of a smile. His mouth is opened, as if halfway through a joke.

His chest feels tight.

-

Climbing down from his nest in Brussels, grabbing onto Natasha’s hand when she offers it, he confesses, “I thought I loved her.”

Natasha fixes him with a hard look and holds his hand tight enough to hurt. “She’s not like us,” she says.

 _You don’t deserve this_.

-

He finds himself in Minnesota, clutching loose paper in one hand, his bow (custom, made of yew) and arrows in the other.

When Laura opens the door, she doesn’t look surprised, just exasperated. Her smile is genuine, and tinged with a little sadness.

-

Maybe he’s selfish, maybe he should let Laura live her life, away from guns and terrorists and secrecy, but she must’ve chosen this life for a _reason_ (right?), and she says, “I’m glad you came,” and he thinks, _I missed you_ , and maybe he has attachment issues born from a lifetime of abandonment, but –

(A year and a half later, she kisses him, sweet and tasting of hope, and says, “We should get married,” and he’s not readydoesn’twanttowillneverbeready, but he says yes anyway.)

-

Asleep on the couch in Laura’s farmhouse, he dreams.

He thinks he has a dog, in the dream, and a child that has his straw-colored hair. His bow is hanging up in the living room, and Natasha comes over every weekend to call him an idiot, and Laura paints wide, sweeping murals that spill out of the frames and onto the walls, the floors, until he can’t see anything but burnt sienna and cadmium red, titanium white and ultramarine blue.  

When he wakes up to the smell of frying eggs and Laura humming off-key under her breath, he wonders if he’s still dreaming.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> next up:
> 
> budapest, barton family kids, and maybe a taste of 2008


	6. decisions

There’s a long string of missions, steadily taking down a terrorist group SHIELD has been tracking for over a decade. Natasha grows grim as the months pass, and he focuses on the methodical snap of the bowstring.

Khartoum, Cairo, Alexandria. Medina, Baghdad, Kabul. Istanbul. Bucharest. 

-

Natasha hates it.

“She’s a good person, Clint,” she says, applying her makeup for tonight’s undercover op.

He clenches his fist around an invisible bow repeatedly and grinds his teeth together. “I know,” he says. “You think I don’t _know_ that?”

Natasha purses her lips together to even out the lipstick – deep red, like blood. “I don’t want either of you to get hurt,” she says, voice calm and neutral.

“I know,” he says, softer.

-

“Everyone thinks I’ll fuck this up,” he confesses, early in the relationship, half-asleep, nose buried into Laura’s hair.

Laura’s hand strokes through his own hair – straw-blond, the color of endless cornfields under an endless blue sky. “Tell me about it,” she says.

When he doesn’t reply, Laura sets down her book on the nightstand and moves so that he’s forced to sit up properly and look her in the eye. “Do you think you’ll fuck this up?” she asks.

“Yes,” he says, glancing away, unable to bear her steady gaze.

“Well,” she says, “if it helps, I think I’ll fuck this up too.”

In the morning, right before Laura’s anthrophobia kicks in and he has to head back to base, he tells her, “We can fuck up together.”

She rolls her eyes and calls him cheesy.

-

Budapest is a clusterfuck.

-

He almost hands in his resignation, but he hands in a form requesting vacation time instead. He gets two months.

-

What they never tell you, starving and begging for scraps on the side of the road, is how much random, useless _stuff_ you accumulate when you have something resembling a steady job and a place to live.

When he finally digs up a duffel bag he’d kept from a mission and starts digging through his piles of junk to find some clean clothes, he’s astonished by the amount of knick-knacks and snow globes he has. His younger self would’ve jizzed in his fucking pants at the amount of stuff he has now.

A _thud_ as a bag lands besides him.

“I’m coming with you,” Natasha says. Her hair is braided back and tossed over a shoulder.

He tosses some probably-clean underwear into his duffel. “I’ll have to clear it with Laura,” he says.

Natasha’s hand lands on his shoulder, making him turn to look at her. Her eyes are soft and apologetic, subdued. “Clint,” she says.

“She loves you,” he says. “We’ll be fine.”

-

They’re not fine.

Even though Laura had seemed fine over the phone, she was decidedly not when they actually arrived. She’s tense and snappy, stressed at the idea that Natasha’s in her space, and Natasha reacts accordingly, too exhausted to hold herself back.

“You’re right,” she hisses at him, “you’re perfect for each other.”

The first night, he sleeps in the rafters of the barn.

In the morning, he finds Nat already packing her things into her small bag. He’s surprised that she hasn’t already left.

“I’m sorry,” she says, sharply.

“It’s not your fault,” he replies. “She’s not actually angry at you. She just isn’t used to you, here.”  

“No,” she says. “I was childish to assume that nothing had changed between her and me, and that I would cause no harm by intruding on your space.”

“She didn’t mean it,” he says.

Laura’s voice sounds out from behind him: “You know I hate it when you talk for me.”

He isn’t surprised; he moves aside to let her into the room.

When she places a hand on Nat’s shoulder, Natasha closes her eyes, as if in pain.

He leaves them to it.

-

They’re fine.

-

One day, he arrives at Laura’s, she stuffs an apple tart into his mouth (“Is this a bribe?” he asks, slightly amused, slightly serious.), and she drags him to the front porch.

“I want a child,” she says, eyes bright and shining, and he freezes.

He has a million excuses on the tip of his tongue – _we can’t I can’t we haven’t been together long enough I can’t be a father I won’t be able to be a father I’m afraid I’ll turn out to be my father I won’t be able to be there for them_ – but he says none of them.

“Oh,” he says instead.

Laura holds his hand in hers and starts slowly, methodically, outlining her reasoning and how they’ll take care of the child, like she’s planned the whole thing out for months. She probably has.

By the time she finishes, the terror is still there, just subdued, lurking underneath the water for a chance to strike, but he’s stopped shaking.  

“I need time,” he says, and Laura nods, understanding.

“I know,” she says, moving her thumb across his bandaged knuckles. “Take all the time you need.”

-

He knows Nat’s history. He knows her, probably more than anyone else in the world, and despite all that, he goes to her anyway.

When he asks, she doesn’t react the way he thinks she will.

Sure, she stiffens, face carefully blank, but her face softens just as fast. She turns away and pretends to inspect her gear.

“It’s your choice,” she says. “My personal feelings have no impact on the matter.”

 _But they do_ , he wants to say, wants to scream. They’ve been together far too long for anything else. 

“You’d be a great father,” Natasha says, voice unfathomably emotionless. She leaves the room.

-

He doesn’t like to reminisce much, but in the late hours, just before the sun sets, he slips past the throngs of people crowding the arena and takes a seat. The smell of popcorn in the air is suffocating.

The lights come down, and the ringmaster steps in, a spotlight trailing behind him like a shadow, and the show begins.

It’s a real three-ring act, this one. With the Swordsman’s, he’d known that it was dying business with barely a decade left in them, but he was young then, and naïve, and desperate for attention. No wonder Duquesne turned to stealing. But this – _The Greatest Show in the World_ – this was something proper. If you unfocused enough you could even overlook the grime, the sweat, the bright-white shining teeth that promised the world and more, if only you’d shell out an extra ten dollars for the sweets and the peanuts to feed the elephants, never mind that it made the aftermath smell like hell on earth.

Here, there are no illusions, because if he listens close enough he can hear the steady _thunk-thunk_ of wood hitting wood, exactly in the center of the target, every time.

He blinks, shakes his head, and stares at the salesman, who’s making his way through the crowd, shoving his spinning, glowing toys into children’s faces. A hand slips into a pocket, an arm snakes around a woman’s shoulders, loud and laughing, to remove her cheap silver necklace.

There are no children working here, not in this tidy, official joint who treats a show like a business deal who’s watched by the world over. But some of the performers look young enough to still be carded at a bar.

Halfway through the trapeze artists’ acts, he slips out after the salesman.

Ten minutes later, he sits back down, watching the clowns, holding a stick of cotton candy.

-

“I think I want a child too,” he tells Laura.

She looks at him, eyes unreadable, and says, “I don’t want to do this if you don’t.”

“I’m one-hundred-and-ten-percent sure I want a child,” he amends.

She smiles, careful and gentle, and he smiles back.

-

He cries the first time he holds Lila in his arms.

-

He lets himself think that this might be real.


	7. lift off

It’s early 2003, not long after he and Laura tie the knot, and he only gets a cursory, “Get on the plane,” before being loaned to the Air Force for a top-secret manhunt for a nuclear physicist no one is willing to say anything about and who seems to barely exist.

There’s the bones of a briefing on Dr. Bruce Banner, but the unease of his teammates seeps into the atmosphere and under his skin. “He’s on the run for stealing classified technology,” General Ross says, refusing to look him in the eye.

They’re hiding something, and when he pushes, there’s a convenient bureaucratic reshuffle that pulls him off the mission and onto a separate plane, headed halfway around the planet. He wishes, not for the first time in his life and definitely not the last, that Natasha was with him.

It makes sense nearly half a decade later, when two giant monsters tear through Harlem; after that, the only thing they can do is sort through the bodies.

-

He shows Nat the video of Lila taking her first steps nearly a dozen times before she takes his phone, fiddles with it for a few minutes, then chucks it into the ocean.

-

The man under him goes limp, dropping the gun they’d been wrestling for on the ground with a heavy _clank_.

He lets up, slightly, still pressing his knee against the man’s chest, and grabs the gun. The man is a low-level human trafficker, barely a blip on his radar, but enough to warrant an order to shoot on sight.

The gunshot rings in his ears.

He wakes up to the man’s last words on his tongue: “Don’t do this. I’ll tell you everything I know. I have a family, kids, a fucking dog, just don’t –“

-

When Tony Stark goes missing, half of the upper management goes ballistic – Coulson’s hairline jumps back a few more inches, Maria Hill orders a takedown of half a dozen terrorist camps in the Middle East and northern Africa, and he and Natasha head into Afghanistan to join the hunt.

He’s not sure the entire endeavor is worth the effort. He knows that SHIELD and every other government agency out there have basically developed an unhealthy dependence on Stark’s tech, and without him the new quinjets sure as hell wouldn’t be rolling out as fast as they are, but that’s just the thing – Stark is volatile and arrogant and seems too self-aware to pull off any of the shit he had pulled off. If he had _half_ of what Stark had – well. There’s no use in daydreaming.

Still, when Tony Stark makes his less-than-triumphant return, he still feels a swell of relief watching Coulson visibly unclench his jaw and take a deep breath before heading to California.

-

He scoops up Lila in his arms and leans in to kiss Laura.

“How’re you holding up?” he asks, setting Lila down so she can go back to her books. Laura’s been reading to her, but Lila likes flipping through the pages on her own, looking at the pictures.

Laura gives him a tired smile. “We’ve been heading into town more so she can socialize,” she says honestly. “I swear, half the reason I put up with her antics is because she’s an excuse to get me out of the house.” Her hand twitches slightly. “She misses you.”

He holds back the instinctual flinch. “Laura,” he says. 

She places a hand on his arm. “We’ve talked about this,” she murmurs. “It’s fine. We’re fine.”   

He didn’t want to become something he’d vowed to never become. (He had missed Lila’s first birthday.)  

-                                                                                                              

He watches on the screen, Laura outside in the shooting range, Lila on the carpet, drawing, as the emotions flicker across Stark’s face and he confesses, “I am Iron Man.”

Then he gets up, tells Laura he’s leaving, says goodbye to Lila, and heads back to base. There’s work to be done.

-

The New Mexico desert is silent and still, not a car on the road for miles in either direction. He calls Laura and Lila and their newest, Cooper, and when they hang up, turns on the radio to listen to music. He grew up listening to country, rock and roll – steady percussion and guitars playing from half-working speakers. Now, he likes jazz. Blues. Classical. Nat would laugh at him for being so predictable.

He pushes his speed up to 100, watching the speedometer tick its way up. 120. 140. The horizon stretches above ahead of him, bright and endless.

“Steady, steady,” he murmurs to himself. 200. The sound of wind is deafening.

220\. His dashboard flashes.

He lifts his foot off the acceleration and lets himself drift before slowly, carefully, pressing the brake.  He reaches a reasonable 80 as another car speeds past him.  

He feels breathless. Feels older than he wants to, feels tied to the earth, bone-tired and heavy. He places his foot on the gas again.

-

Laura laughs when he tells her.

“Thor?” she asks. “The Norse god of thunder?”

“That’s the one,” he says. “Bit of a dick. Don’t even get me started on his brother.”

 “I heard from Natasha that you’ve found a certain someone,” Laura says when he finishes explaining, “Captain America?”

This time, he laughs, unable to muffle the sound. “Captain America,” he confirms. “Frozen in the Arctic for 70 years, still alive. Thor. Weird glowing blue cube that’s probably a doorway to the other end of the galaxy.”

It’s been a busy few weeks.

“Strange times,” Laura finishes for him.

“God, ten-year-old me would’ve been so excited.” He used to steal the comics from the library, dropping them off at the next place they stopped.

“Current-you isn’t?” There’s a shuffling sound and then: “Say hello to daddy.”

He smiles involuntarily as Lila starts chattering away. She’d been slow to start talking, but once she figured it out, it was nearly impossible to get her to stop.

When he gets Laura back on the phone, he says, “Hey, Laura. I’ve been stationed here indefinitely. I don’t know when I’ll be able to come home. I’ll try to call as often as I can.”

Laura makes quiet shushing noises, to him or to Lila or to Cooper he doesn’t know. “It’s alright,” she says. “I can manage myself, you know.”

He closes his eyes. “Yeah, I know. I just wanted to apologize, for not being around for the kids.”

Laura’s voice is firm when she replies, “We have an arrangement,” she says. “It works.”

He doesn’t know how to say, _I still want to be there for them. I want them to remember me. I can’t be an absent father._

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” he says instead.

-

He remembers going to church as a very young child, back when he didn’t know any better but to follow when his brother grabbed his hand and told him not to let go.

The ministers were bold and loud, and when they told of the Son of God, sacrificing Himself for the rest of humanity, he couldn’t help but listen, rapture swelling in his heart and body, eyes wide with wonder.

“Repent,” the minister said, his voice clear. “Surrender yourself to Him, and you will be saved.”

As the bright blue glow of the scepter washes over him, he thinks, with a part of himself that can’t quite force itself into consciousness, that sounds suspiciously like Natasha, _I’m not surrendering to the likes of_ you _._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> up next: avengers (sort of. kind of. not really)


	8. janus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this was the chapter i was most excited about, but for avengers fic, this sure took a while to get to The Avengers. also, tentative chapter count!

Laura is young when she joins SHIELD – a week out of college, eyes bright and eager. She starts as an analyst, but when a mission needs an extra pair of hands, they call her on. She resists at first, because she hadn’t signed on for this, but she’s assigned to Hawkeye, then to the Black Widow, and she stops complaining.

-

After the incident, Laura stares at her hand, shaky and pale even against the bright white of the hospital sheets, and wonders what she’s going to do now. She can’t do field work, not if she doesn’t want to get herself and her entire team killed, but she can’t quite imagine herself sitting at her desk again, pouring over profiles and kill counts.

Natasha sits by her bedside. “In my line of work,” she says, “no one retires. You work, or you’re dead.”’

Laura fiddles with a loose strand on her top. “I’m not dead,” she says.

Natasha smiles, indulgently. “For people like us,” she says, and Natasha doesn’t have to clarify who she means by “us” for Laura to know that it doesn’t include her, “this is life. There is nothing but this.”

Laura is too tired to argue. Natasha and Clint – they can’t wrap their heads around it: why would she end up in a job alongside brainwashed, ex-Soviet spies and carnie trailer trash, people who’ve lost more than they can ever dream of gaining? They can’t imagine that it might be a choice – her choice – because they would never choose the life they’ve had.

Nat pulls Laura’s blanket up higher. “Go home,” she says before she leaves. “Live a life.”

She must think she’s being kind.

-

There are memories in her old family home in the Midwest that relieve the aching pressure in her head. Pus drips from the infected wound of the present, but Laura sees the future in this house, with its creaking walls and its leaking pipes, the overgrown grass and rusted gates. It is a lonely future, but it is, she thinks, one she’ll be content with.

Laura doesn’t expect Clint to show up on her doorstep while she tears down the wall to put insulation in, but she can’t say she isn’t pleased to see him perching on the edge of the couch, looking awkward as he glances around at the piles of wood stacked up in one corner and her abandoned tools near the doorway to the kitchen.

There’s a faint itch building underneath her skin, but she ignores it in favor of listening to Clint ramble on about nothing in particular. It doesn’t work as well when the clock ticks over the hour and the feeling starts to threaten to crawl out of her skin. She can barely breathe. Clint’s presence turns from comforting to suffocating, even as he does his best to try to shrink into himself. She can’t breathe.

She stands abruptly, her knee knocking into the coffee table and nearly tipping over her mug, and says, with all the power she doesn’t have, “Clint, stand outside for a moment.” She sounds calmer than she feels.

For his credit, Clint darts out of the front door as quickly as he can, keeping his face blank.

The panic fades, replaced by faint, nagging anxiety.

Laura gets a glass of water and sits back onto the couch. She thinks, _I can’t do this_. Thinks, _This is yours_. Thinks, _You don’t have to give it to anyone else_. Thinks, _You feel safe here_. Thinks, _I feel safe with him_. Thinks, _No, I don’t._

She breathes deeply. She lets Clint back in.

He has a pinched look to his expression.

“So,” he says, “we going to talk about this, or what?”

Laura perches on the couch. “Of course,” she says, sardonic. “That would be the healthy thing to do.”

Clint smiles. His front teeth are chipped slightly from one too many fights. Laura focuses on that.

-

Lila is born two weeks early on a cold night in October, the wind high and howling. Laura is alone when she calls her closest neighbor and is driven the half-hour to the hospital, but she wakes in the morning, to Clint sitting by her bed.

“Where-?” she asks, her breathing speeding up as she realizes that her baby is nowhere in sight. “Is she-?”

“She’s fine,” Clint says, placing a hand on her arm. “She’s just a little weak, but she’ll be fine.” He sounds tired.

“Right,” Laura says, a little shaky, still drunk on pain and exhaustion. She gets a closer look at Clint now that she’s calmed down.

He’s dressed in his uniform, eyes tinged with red.

Laura frowns. She says, “I hope that’s not pinkeye.”

Clint sniffles and rubs at his eye. “It’s not pinkeye,” he says. “We’re calling her Lila, right?”

They had picked out the name together, trawling through baby books Natasha gave them, half as a joke and half-serious.

“Lila,” Clint had said, pointing at the name sandwiched between “Liberty” and “Lillian.” “Sounds pretty.”

Laura had teased him for only liking the name because it sounded like “Laura.” So did Nat, but in her off-handed way that made her sound both sincere and sarcastic.

But the name held, and by the end of her second trimester Laura would clutch at her belly and speak idly to Lila as she worked.

“Lila,” Laura confirmed. Then, anxiety taking over again: “You saw her right? How is she?”

Clint smiles at her. “She’s beautiful.”

-

“I miss it,” Laura says. “Sometimes.”

Clint stares at her. In horror, perhaps. In terrible understanding.

“Natasha was right,” she says, and rocks Lila back and forth in her arms.

-

Spring. She’s fixing up the shooting range. Lila is in the house, napping. Laura sneezes; she’s developed a slight allergy to the spring pollen, but it’s almost worth it to see the blooms of red and yellow and orange spread out over the landscape. Clint is somewhere in southern Nevada. He had called yesterday with mounting agitation over the strange blue cube he’s been stationed with for months and months now.

The Swan’s Theme sings out over the sounds of the drill, and she has to fumble for a bit before she’s over to pick up the phone with a “Hey, Tasha.”

When she hears Natasha say, “It’s Clint,” strained and unbearably angry, she wonders if she’s dreaming. As easy as breathing, as easy as gods and magic and streaks of red and gold flying through the sky, her worst nightmares have come true.

-

Laura calls Nick Fury, then Phil Coulson, then Maria Hill, but all of them say the same thing: _Barton’s been compromised. We’re working on it._

She calls Natasha again, and she says: “Remember Thor? His brother, Loki, has a mind control device. He’s – we’ve got him on the Helicarrier, right now.” She curses in Russian and quickly runs through the events of the past day or so – Dr. Bruce Banner, Captain America, Germany, Tony Stark.

Laura has half a mind to head to SHIELD headquarters herself, but she knows herself too well for that. Too much change, too many people. And Lila has dance class in town tomorrow.

“We’ll crack him,” Nat promises. “We’ll get Clint back. I still have something owed.”

Natasha can only imagine her life as a series of debts – obligations and balancing life against life. Laura doesn’t know how to describe the terror of giving, of handing people your heart and expecting nothing in return.

-

She picks up the phone as soon as it rings. She hears, “Laura,” low and raw through the crackling phone receiver, and almost cries.

Clint tells her, “I have to go. Gotta defeat a Norse god with Captain America and Tasha,” and hangs up.

-

Laura knows better than to believe in heroes, but she and Lila watch, enraptured, at the shaky video feed as aliens tear through New York City, the Hulk (“I can’t believe Ross was hiding this for all that time. He helped decimate Harlem, Laura.”) tears through the city alongside them, and Thor (“An alien should _not_ be that hot.”) calls down lightning from the sky.

There is little footage of Natasha, of Clint, but they’re there nonetheless: a women with bright red hair fighting alongside Captain America, arrows streaking through the air and embedding into alien insides, smooth as a knife through butter.

“Clint’s there,” Laura whispers to Lila. “Your daddy’s saving the world.”

Lila buries her face into Laura’s chest. “Why?” she asks. “’S he gonna be okay?”

Laura runs her fingers through Lila’s hair. “He’ll be alright, Lila.”

“Will we be alright?”

“We’ll be alright, sweet-pea.”

-

Tony Stark (“Terrible flirt.”) flies a nuke into a portal to the other side of the galaxy. Loki and Thor go home. The media goes wild with speculation – _Who are the Avengers?_ ; _An Inside Look at SHIELD; Is Captain America Actually Captain America?; Heroes and Monsters: the Hulk; After Afghanistan: A Portrait of Anthony E. Stark._

Clint comes home a month later, and he very carefully avoids talking about Loki, about the Chitauri, about anything that isn’t Lila starting school soon (they decide to homeschool her).

Laura knows, from experience, not to pry. He’ll talk when he’s ready.

-

“The Avengers, huh?”

Clint laughs. “It’s an emergency response team. Nothing’s changing.”

“I don’t know,” Laura says. “Seems like a pretty big deal.” She wraps her arm around her stomach.

-

Laura knows better to believe in heroes. She thinks she can try, anyway.


	9. shadows

As the months pass, New York City slowly starts looking like itself again, Tony Stark never gets around to fixing the sign on Stark Tower, and Natasha makes him an anonymous Twitter account so he can monitor the ongoing media frenzy surrounding the Avengers.

There are endless funerals to go to (He doesn’t go to Coulson’s; instead, he gets hilariously drunk with Natasha. It’s less hilarious the next morning, and even less hilarious when he finds out Coulson’s still alive.), even if he has to hide in the shadows for most of them.

-

SHIELD takes the whole betrayal thing surprisingly well, considering his past, but he figures joining Nick Fury’s favorite pet project helps. Even with that, he’s still not very welcome at SHIELD headquarters, so he requests the longest and hardest missions from upper management (of which there are many; the chaos left in the wake of the battle is still rippling out across the globe). He doesn’t use his bow on any of them – too distinctive, at the moment.

He heads to South Africa, then snakes his way up, past the Horn, into the Middle East and down into India. He spends a few days in Calcutta – Banner’s old stomping grounds, before Natasha brought him in – while he waits for intel, then heads north, past the Himalayas into Tibet. By the time he arrives in Hong Kong, he’s half a year past the invasion, his personal phone is full of pictures of his new son from both Nat and Laura, and the so-called “Avengers” have been disregarded, pushed aside as a one-off, especially since Thor hasn’t been seen since his departure, Banner’s disappeared into Stark labs, and Captain America’s been sequestered in SHIELD. 

He arrives at home with a fresh tan and two new bullet wounds, but he’s barely there for two weeks – just enough time to catch up with Lila and fawn over Cooper before being shipped out with Tasha to the Middle East to hunt down the Ten Rings, who somehow are still upright and kicking.

It’s nothing less than a hurricane of activity, of countless weeks spent pouring over intel and maps and building layouts, and he can’t help but feel grateful for all of them.

-

He doesn’t know how Nat and Captain Rogers – “Clint, you know he wants you to call him Steve. He’s just too damn polite to say it to your face.” – get along so well. It may just be because Nat gets along with everyone, but he still treads around the Captain like a twelve-year-old tiptoeing around his first crush. 

He hears Rogers come up behind him on the range long before Rogers makes his presence known. The guy’s not necessarily what you’d call stealthy, but he knowns Nat’s been giving lessons.

“Where’d you train?” Rogers asks, watching him heft his bow into the air, three arrows between his fingers. There’s a light thump as Rogers drops whatever bag he’s holding onto the floor.

He nearly misses, but the arrows easily embed themselves into the body-shaped target. “The circus,” he replies, smooth. “Not as impressive as the front lines, I know.”

Rogers huffs, a soft sound that would be missed if he were not hyper aware of his surroundings for his next shot. “I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” he says. “USO shows taught me to throw a punch like nothing else.”

Rogers watches him shoot for ten more minutes or so. “Barton,” he says. “You’re a good shot, and an even better strategist.”

He sets his bow down and picks up a rifle. “Don’t be getting all sweet on me now, Cap,” he says. He can feel Rogers’s stare, heavy on his back, without ever needing to look at him.

A soft shoe shuffle, the rustling of fabric. “I do enjoy working with you,” Rogers says, and leaves.

-

He dreams of blue.

He doesn’t dream, normally – a fact he’s been thankful for ever since his father started stumbling home with the heady scent of alcohol – but since Loki, he hasn’t been able to sleep without visions of _blueblueblue_.

He wakes up quietly – he’s trained too well for anything else – breathing heavily. The lights in the room are dimmed, and he can see Natasha sitting on the bed opposite him, surrounded by two computers. The light from the screens makes her face feel washed out and alien.

“Good morning,” she says.

The time on the clock next to the bed reads 3:15. He groans. His head aches. “Morning,” he mumbles into the bedsheets.

He focuses on his breathing. Natasha’s quiet, but he can feel her presence in the air. Poised. Comforting.

He falls asleep, and he doesn’t dream.

-

If you had asked his younger self what he thought he’d be doing in ten years, he certainly wouldn’t imagine this: rebuilding the chicken coop after years of well-worn use, showing his little girl how to hammer in a nail without hammering her own nails, holding both his son and daughter in his arms as he reads to both of them, watching Laura digging up weeds in the vegetable beds as he makes food for the kids.

But there’s only more of the same: guns, violence, the steady _thwick-thwick_ of his bow.

-

He’s sent to a hideout in Alaska. For what, he’s not sure, but there’s something brewing in the depths of SHIELD R & D that he doesn’t quite want to poke.

He’s right. He watches from four thousand miles away as SHIELD goes up in flames.


	10. upshot

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> and beyond.

He holds Laura’s hands tightly in his. Her hands are ink-stained and warm.

“We’re safe,” he says quietly. “The SHIELD files –“

She kisses him, effectively shutting him up. She pulls away, resting her forehead on his. “We’re safe,” she repeats. “The kids are safe. I love you.”

His eyes feel heavy and there’s a pinching feeling growing at the bridge of his nose. “I thought that SHIELD was good. Good as it could get.”

“You know better than that,” Laura says.

He does.

“You were good. You are good,” Laura says.

“You made me good,” he says.

“No,” Laura replies. “I didn’t.”

Lila and Cooper are asleep. It’s late. He’s never lived a silent life, from the deafening terror of his childhood to the roaring of his ears on missions to the ever-present buzz of the quinjets and the Helicarrier, but the late summer air is ripe with the kind of silence that only exists, for one brief, glowing moment, after the release of an arrow.

“They called me. The Avengers,” he says.

“They need you,” Laura says. “Go.”

He goes.

-

He’s never worked with a team before – not for this long, not with this many people. The most he’s had has been Natasha.

He gets a quinjet to fly, and new bows and arrows (sticky arrows, acid arrows, _boomerang_ arrows), and the satisfaction of taking down Hydra bases one after the other.

He’s worked with Steve – he knows Steve. Steve is solid and dependable and a damned good leader. He didn’t get the Captain title for nothing. He doesn’t talk about James Buchanan Barnes.

He likes Thor. Thor is grossly fascinated in human culture and seems to greet everything with enough enthusiasm to drown. Thor tells them stories of Asgard, of cities and galaxies beyond the stars. Stark tunes him out, lips thin and eyes narrowed.

Stark is loud, and brash, and everything he had believed Stark would be. He’s also whip-smart, talking circles around the rest of them with Banner, and he’s reckless in a way that ends up with him taking out an entire Hydra base on his own, saving all of the hidden files and computers.

Banner is quiet and doesn’t seem to know how to act around other people. He avoids Steve and spends all his time with Nat and Stark. He smiles nervously and, despite his genius and Stark’s rambling, tries to include all of them in the conversation when he and Stark are talking science, explaining nuclear physics in his calm and steady voice.

Natasha is Natasha.

-

They’re young, and it aches. They remind him of himself.

Wanda is bright and sparkling, and when he closes his eyes, he can see Pietro’s eyes, wide and stunned.

She’s so young, with more power than he can ever imagine at her fingertips.

“My wife,” he says. “We own a little place in the Midwest. Please. Feel free to visit.”

She never does, but he thinks the thought might count.

-

And then, and then, and then.

-

He retires, and at first it seems like a blessing. He fixes up the barn, once and for all, lavishes affection on Lila and Cooper and little Nathaniel, stands on the shooting range side by side with Laura, arrow after arrow sinking into the bullseye as Laura refreshes her gun skills.

He does try golf, driving an hour out to the nearest golf course and shooting hole-in-ones until he realizes he should be laying low. He shoots a birdie.

He teaches Lila how to shoot a bow and arrow. She doesn’t hit the target until two hours into their lessons, and she quits the next day (“Daddy, this is boring.”). She likes dance and helping him build. He couldn’t be happier.

He doesn’t think about the Accords until Captain America calls.

 _We need you_ , Steve says, and he can’t say no.

-

He’s been in prison twice, but he’s never been in a secret facility in the middle of the ocean, put in there by someone he had thought was his friend.

He’s never been that close to Tony, but-

Wanda. Steve. Natasha.

He’s never been that close to Tony.

-

He goes home, or some measure of it, anyway.

Cooper and little Nat are terrified, because they don’t quite understand why they’ve had to pack up their entire lives and run halfway across the world, to this small safehouse in western Europe barely stocked with food.

Lila’s old enough to understand the Accords, and she’s old enough to be angry. Not at Stark and the others. At him.

“Dad,” she says, “you should’ve signed them.”

He sighs. “I couldn’t.”

She frowns. “Don’t you care about us?”

He knows – he knows they deserve better. “I’m sorry,” he says to Laura, over and over and over.

They deserve better.

-

After Barney, after the circus, after SHIELD, after Natasha, after Laura, after New York, after the Avengers, Ultron, the Accords, Thanos, he goes back to the farm in Minnesota.

It’s rundown, only after a few years of abandonment, the walls worn, the wood rotting, the pipes rusting, the fields overrun with weeds and tall grass. The wind is gentle against his skin. He can hear the soft chirping of songbirds, the rustle of leaves.

He makes his way into the barn. There are discarded arrows on the floor, snapped in half and tips too dulled to be of any use. Over his back, there’s a quiver filled with arrows and a bow – osage orange, given to him by Laura for his birthday five years ago – in his left hand.

The targets are still set up, bullet holes in the fabric from Laura shooting.

He raises the bow in his right hand, notches the arrow with his left. Pulls back. Inhales.

He’s never had a physical home for as long as he had this one. Lila grew up here. Cooper. Nathaniel was born here. He can still feel the presence of Laura, of Natasha. Steve and Tony, chopping wood. Laura painting murals across the walls. Natasha drinking hot chocolate by the windowsill.

He shoots. Exhales.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the end :) this was going to be longer, but i wanted it to finish it before infinity war, and at the pace i was going, there was no way i would've finished by then. hope you liked it!


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